with terrorism. And they were skeptical
of their court-appointed lawyers, who
were employed by the same govern-
ment that had ordered their arrest.
"There were a lot of people, a lot of
cameras, a lot of papers, a lot of talking,
and no air," Touré recalled. "I couldn't
think. I couldn't breathe."
The three men were housed in the
Metropolitan Correctional Center, in
lower Manhattan. An Arabic-speak-
ing psychologist met with them to eval-
uate their emotional state, but since
Arabic was not their first language---
they spoke Songhay---neither Touré
nor Issa understood much of what she
was saying. Abdelrahman had learned
some rudimentary Arabic as a child, as
a servant in the homes of wealthy Al-
gerian families, but he didn't under-
stand the psychologist's role. "She's
asking if we want to kill ourselves,"
Abdelrahman told Touré and Issa.
"Maybe what's coming next is so bad
that we will prefer to die."
Later that day, the men made their
first appearance in court. Julia Gatto,
an attorney in the federal public de-
fender's o ce, said of Abdelrahman,
"When the judge called his name, he
fell on his knees, and cried, 'I swear. I
swear.' " Gatto said, "All I could think
was, What kind of terrorists are these?"
Gatto was assigned to represent Issa.
"Usually when I meet a client in his
circumstances he understands what it
is to be arrested, or who a judge is, or
what bail means," Gatto said. "There
were basic concepts and words that he
didn't understand, because he had never
been here. He had never been in the
system; he had never seen an episode
of 'Law & Order.' "
The Malians' lawyers warned them
that, under the terms of the narco-ter-
rorism statute, the government's case
was entirely winnable, and urged them
to negotiate a plea. "When a jury hears
'Al Qaeda,' it stops listening to every-
thing else," Gatto said.
Touré thought that his lawyers ei-
ther had given up on him or were plot-
ting with the prosecution. It seemed
absurd that his improvised boasts to
David and Mohamed could be enough
to convict him. He asked his relatives
in Mali to sell his home and to finish
a pending construction project, so that
he could hire a private attorney. The
relatives sent him thirty thousand dol-
lars, enough only for a retainer. When
the money ran out, the attorney quit.
Touré then asked the judge to reap-
point his original public defenders, and
he immersed himself in the case. He
spent nights listening to audio record-
ings from the sting operation, point-
ing out discrepancies in how the con-
versations were translated. Because he
was illiterate, he asked his lawyers to
read him all the documents filed in
court, so that he would know what ar-
guments were going to be made.
In early 2012, after the Malians had
been in prison for more than two years,
prosecutors announced that they had
decided not to call Mohamed to tes-
tify. Abdelrahman's attorney, Zachary
Margulis-Ohnuma, saw it as a break-
through. "The government's whole case
relied on Mohamed's credibility," he
told me. By not calling Mohamed to
testify, he believed, the prosecutors
would throw his credibility into ques-
tion. "I really believed we were going
to win," Margulis-Ohnuma said.
On the eve of the trial, prosecutors
brought up a seemingly unre-
lated piece of evidence: the story of an
American missionary named Christo-
pher Leggett, who had been killed by
AQIM in 2009, the year that Touré, Ab-
delrahman, and Issa were arrested. Leg-
gett, a thirty-nine-year-old father of
four, had been shot near a school that
he ran in a poor neighborhood in Mau-
ritania. Prosecutors shared photographs
showing groups of dark-skinned, tur-
banned men waving rocket launchers
and automatic rifles over the heads of
kidnapping victims---all of them white,
all visibly terrified.The prosecutors ar-
gued that the murder demonstrated
why terrorist conspiracies in Africa
posed a threat to the United States. "It
shows jurisdiction," Christian Everdell,
one of the prosecutors, said.
"If you look at the people in those
pictures, and you look at me and Idriss,
you would think we are the same," Touré
said. Margulis-Ohnuma said that he
felt "sandbagged." As far as Touré